Page 43 of Resisted

“Then what are you?”

What was I? Weak. Scared. Second-guessing every fucking decision I’d made in the past few years. “I’m…tense.”

She laughed, the melody like a fucking balm on my nerves. That fact alone should’ve had me pulling over and kicking her out. I didn’t want her to soothe me, I didn’t want my body to calm at the sight of her, but it seemed the fates hadn’t given me a choice. As much as I wanted to loath and deny that fact, I couldn’t. I’d tried to push her away because damnit, I’d had my single mate and Bella was nearly my damn sister, but I couldn’t fucking bring myself to fully do it. Not anymore. Not after that single touch of her lips.

There was a war inside of me, a push and pull. Part of me screamed I needed to run, I needed to push her away, because the fates wouldn’t tempt a man with a fruit he shouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t do this to a poor sap of a shifter. Yet there she was, sitting in my passenger seat, and I questioned everything I’d ever thought up until this point because for a brief moment in time, those damn lips had touched mine.

“I make you tense then?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to gather myself. “I never said I was tense because of you.”

“Well you were surely relaxed as you waited outside your truck in your douche pose, so one could only conclude that I am the reason you’re damaging your poor truck.”

I loosened my grip because yeah, I might have actually caused a crack in the steering wheel. “It wasn’t a douche pose.”

“I mean, with those glasses, it kind of was.” Her head turned toward me as a smile played on her lips.

I let my head fall back onto the headrest as I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the road. “I didn’t mean to do that, Bella.”

“Do what?” she questioned, and I knew she was going to make me fucking say it.

“Kiss you,” I confessed. “I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Oh.” She almost sounded hurt. “So you want to pretend like that didn’t happen?”

Did I? Fuck no. I wished I could regret it, but I fucking didn’t. That was the issue. I’d been spending all this time trying to keep my boys away from her when I should’ve tried harder to keep myself away. One moment of weakness, and suddenly, I couldn’t get enough. I was a sap—a weak fucking sap.

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s implied, Silas. Everything you never say is always implied.” She spat the words out like fire, and I felt the burn, felt the sear of the heat as it licked against my skin.

“Like fuck it was implied,” I said, absorbing her fire and releasing it back instantly, without thinking. “Just because I didn’t mean it doesn’t mean I regret it. It just means I need to fucking process shit.”

“Would an onion ring help?”

“What?”

“When I need to process something, I find food helps.” She took off her seatbelt and reached toward the backseat.

My hand shot out. “I don’t want onion rings.”

“Oh.” Her chest rose and fell heavily before she sat back down. “I just thought—”

“I’m still looking, you know,” I blurted out. “For your family.”

“And that’s what bugs you about me so much? That I have another family out there?” she questioned, but she just didn’t get it. She didn’t grasp the magnitude of the importance, and she never would. When I didn’t answer, she prompted, “Silas, what aren’t you telling me?”

Everything. I wasn’t telling her everything of importance. Everything that meant anything to me. “You’re my family Bella.”

“And that’s why you regret kissing me?”

“I said I didn’t fucking regret it,” I said on a growl.

“And that’s why the kiss that you don’t regret has put you in a fucking mood,” she clarified.

“Bella…” I warned.

“Silas,” she shot back.